by Ivan Coyote
In the library, I learned that you could prevent the ground under your foundation from thawing and swallowing or heaving up your house by putting no less than two feet of dry gravel down to build upon. I learned that after the first round of buildings erected in town started sagging and moaning and leaning against each other, the government was forced to amend the building codes to account for the permafrost. I learned that the ideal northern dwelling was a small shack built up on skids to insulate the ice beneath it from the fire inside.
Then I had a thought that caused a ball of burning cold to begin to grow in my belly. What would happen if the permafrost all melts? The Wal-Mart was bad enough. What would stop them from building twelve-storey condominium towers right downtown with a comfortable view of the river?
I guess they called it permafrost back then because they thought it was going to stay frozen forever.
FOUR: SOMETHING ABOUT THE LIGHT
A few years ago, I was working on a film set, doing props on a mind-numbingly shallow and poorly written made-for-TV movie. The overtime was draining away my sense of humour while simultaneously filling up my bank account, and to pass the time I was yakking to the director of photography about adapting one of my stories into a short film. He reckoned that we could shoot the whole thing in a couple of days, maybe up in Squamish or out in Mission, someplace like that.
I shook my head and explained to him that the story takes place in the Yukon in early July, when the midnight sun barely brushes the horizon before it starts back up again, and that there was no way to replicate the kind of not quite sun that shines at three a.m. in the middle of a northern summer. It’s all about the light, I told him, and the never getting dark bit was the crucial key to my main characters motivation, as the relentless light has been known to do crazy things to the minds of folks who need the night to sleep, or mark the passing of another day.
“We’d need to shoot it up north, it’s the only way,” I told him.
He shook his head like I had let him down somehow.
“Now what kind of an attitude is that to have? Of course I can light for the midnight sun. I can make anywhere look like anywhere, with the right gels and a light meter. That’s why they call it movie magic; surely I don’t need to tell you, of all people. I can’t believe I get this kind of line from the props guy who found us pumpkins in July.”
He was referring to the time we had to shoot a Halloween scene just before the Canada Day long weekend, the first week in July. It is a well known fact that you can’t buy a pumpkin anywhere until at least the end of September at the earliest, even in the big city.
“I didn’t bring you pumpkins in July, Gregory. I hand-painted fifty fucking watermelons orange, and it was a nightmare. There is no such thing as pumpkins in July.”
“My point exactly,” he said, “but the viewing audience never found that out. Paint a watermelon orange and voilà, you got your Halloween. Same thing goes with your midnight light.”
“Those watermelons never looked at all like pumpkins, dude, and you know it. They were totally the wrong shape. In fact, I should have been fired for incompetence. They always just looked like fruit dressed up like a vegetable. An orange melon does not a squash make, my friend. And the only place that looks like the Yukon is the Yukon. That’s why the city hippies flock up there in packs every spring, and risk the frostbite. There’s just something about the light. You’d know it if you saw it.”
There is just something about the light.
One time I left Vancouver on June 21 and floored it, heading due north. I hit the town of Williams Lake just as the sun was starting to droop in the sky a little, and I didn’t stop for dinner. It was summer solstice, so the farther and faster I drove away from the equator, the longer the day became. Round about the time the porch lights were going on in Williams Lake behind me, I was already gassing up in Prince George, 240 clicks farther north. The sun was just starting to turn the smoke from the pulp mill pink there, but it wouldn’t be fully dark in Prince George until I was already halfway to Dawson Creek, where the day was just starting to wind itself down. I drove for a total of four or five hours inside this perpetual sunset, feeling my wheels turning over the horizon again and again to find just a little more daylight stretched out in front of my windshield, and seeing a little more blue night creeping into my rearview mirror with every mile I left behind.
When I got to Whitehorse, my dad told me the truckers call a long haul north like that chasing the light.
My last trip home, I realized that even Wal-Mart and permafrost-proof skyscrapers and global warming will never make the sun go down any earlier in the month of June in my hometown, and that thirty below is still thirty below, no matter how close you get to park your truck to the front door of the mall. A three-in-the-morning sun will still cast sideways shadows every summer, and the slow curve of the clay cliffs will always cut the cold wind in half as soon as you round the corner halfway down the road we never stopped calling the Two Mile Hill.
There are some places that are difficult to pave over, places that will never thaw out and become soft, and there are people who still hold pictures in their head of what was torn down to make room for what now stands in its place. There are folks who remember that the Westmark used to be called the Travelodge before the guys who renamed it the Sheffield sold it off to the Americans, but they are becoming an increasingly rare breed. There are 30,700 souls who reside in the Yukon, but only 1,200 of them are over the age of sixty-five. The old-timers are retiring to tell their stories to strangers in Florida, or to their new neighbours in a two-bedroom split level condo in Kelowna, where the fruit trees grow and the old bones don’t feel as cold.
But both of my grandmothers claim that they wouldn’t want to live anywhere else, that they can’t imagine any better dirt to be buried in than the stuff that is already under their feet. There are too many memories here to move them all to somewhere new. This is the place they raised their children and outlived their husbands. They tell me that almost everything about this place has changed at least once already in their half a century here. They tell me that their memories cannot be renovated, just forgotten. Grandma Flo says she is blessed because all of her children turned out happy and her eldest son is a man of God, and that if the spot on her head turns out to be cancer, well, then, she’s lived a long and lucky life. Grandma Pat tells me that ever since her last brother, Bob, passed away two summers ago, she is the sole remaining of her parents’ five children. She tells me the only reason she is telling me any of this at all is because all of her old memories become just a little bit closer to immortal every time there is someone listening.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to thank Mette Bach, who, during the four years these stories and columns were written and collected, was my new crush, my sweetheart, my partner, my live-in lover, my fiancée, my ex, and now one of my dearest friends. I hope I can be as remarkable a friend to her as she has been to me.
I must also thank the English Department at Carleton University, most notably the dogged and determined Jodie Medd, whose hard work and support brought me to Ottawa and made my stay as writer-in-residence happen, and Robin Perelle and the staff at Xtra! West, for publishing my column, “Loose End,” for an unbelievable eight years now.
Once again, Brian Lam, Shyla Seller, Janice Beley, and the rest of the fine folks at Arsenal Pulp Press have to be acknowledged, not only for believing in me and my work, but for defying the odds and continuing to publish the kind of books that make me proud to work with a kick-ass independent Canadian publishing house.
I must also mention the many artists who have inspired me, either through our collaborations or just by being lucky enough to have been touched by their work. Veda Hille, Rae Spoon, Richard Van Camp, Dan Bushnell, Lyndell Montgomery, Anna Camilleri, Billeh Nickerson, Michael V. Smith, Elizabeth Hay, Cris Derksen, Kim Barlow, Kim Beggs, Elizabeth Bachinsky, Alison Bechdel, Charlie Chiarelli, and Dan Mangan, among others and in no particula
r order. I am proud and blessed to have crossed paths with all of you.
Lastly, I wish to extend my most heartfelt gratitude to everyone who reads my columns, listens to my CDs, buys my books, and, especially, comes out to hear me tell stories in real time. It is true what they say: without an audience, a storyteller is just some guy talking to himself.
IVAN E. COYOTE is a writer, performer, and the author of four other books published by Arsenal Pulp Press: the three story collections Close to Spider Man, (shortlisted for the Danuta Gleed Short Fiction Prize), One Man’s Trash, and Loose End (shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Women’s Fiction Award), as well as the 2006 novel Bow Grip (also shortlisted for the Ferro-Grumley Women’s Fiction Award and winner of the ReLit award).